A Serenade to Music

This year’s opening night is a wonderful gala concert. Four world-renowned soloists perform songs and ensembles by Schubert, Schumann, Debussy, Saint-Saëns and others. Schola Cantorum of Oxford is city’s leading choir and we are delighted that they will join us to conclude the concert with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s extraordinary Serenade to Music, setting words from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which famously reduced Rachmaninov to tears at its premiere.